HDP open for possible alliance with Turkey's Hezbollah affiliated party

The statements of pro-Kurdish HDP MP Kadri Yıldırım and the general secretary of Hüda-Par Zekeriya Yapıcıoğlu indicate a possible alliance of two parties in Turkey's general elections scheduled for 2019

Pro-Kurdish Peoples' Democracy Party (HDP) MP Kadri Yıldırım said "HDP and Hüda-Par should be knocking on each other's door to the benefit of the Kurdish people" in an interview with a local media on March 14. Hüda-Par (Free Cause Party) is affiliated with Turkey's Sunni-Islamist militant organisation Hezbollah.

Yıldırım noted that in an atmosphere where the political parties have been discussing an alliance for the elections in 2019, HDP and Hüda-Par should be discussing alliance seriously by taking into consideration the benefit of the Kurdish people.

Adding that Hüda-Par has a certain political support in Eastern and South-eastern Turkey where Kurdish people are densely populated, Yıldırım said that Hüda-Par has not yet declared a support for the alliance of AKP, Turkey's ruling party and MHP, the ultra-nationalist party. If Hüda-Par is to declare a support for AKP-MHP alliance, said Yıldırım, it will be hard for Hüda-Par to explain its support for this alliance to its supporter religious Kurdish population.

HIZBOLLAH'S GRAVE HOUSES

Turkey's Hezbollah — unrelated to its Lebanese namesake — is one of the main radical Islamist organizations in Turkey. The group was founded in 1978 and got organized in the mainly Kurdish southeast. Hezbollah earned itself a gruesome nationwide reputation in the early 2000s when police discovered its so-called grave houses across Turkey, in which dozens of people were killed and buried after torture. The victims who disavowed Hezbollah's ideology and journalists.

In 2003, a year after AKP came to power, Hezbollah sympathizers founded the Association for Human Rights and Solidarity with the Oppressed, which was outlawed in 2012, leading to the creation of the Free Cause Party (Hüda-Par) the same year.

HÜDA-PAR GAVE GREEN LIGHT

HP MP Yıldırım's statements are a response to Zekeriya Yapıcıoğlu, the general secretary of Hüda-Par, who commented on March 12 about the question of local media whether they are considering an alliance with HDP. Yapıcıoğlu said "If we are talking about a political alliance, an alliance aimed for a mutual political goal, we will not get side by side; but if we are talking about an alliance for the elections, we will not say 'no we cannot form alliance'."

Turkey’s general elections are scheduled to be held in November 2019 to elect both the President and the Grand National Assembly. On March 13, the Turkish parliament passed a new law on pre-election alliances and electoral regulations, accepted with the majority votes of the MPs of AKP and MHP. According to the new law, the barrier for entering the parliament will remain at the 10-percent level. But in case of the creation of an alliance, the result will be calculated for the whole coalition, not for each party. So a party will be able to enter the parliament even if it gets less than 10 percent of votes.